Obsolescence. A leit-motif of our modern age is captured with grace and humor in the artwork of Brian Dettmer. Starting with once common but now superfluous items such as cassette tapes or Encyclopedia sets, Brian Dettmer creates new beauty. The mere concept of reformulating a dead media as a skeleton suffices, but Dettmer hones the message; as the viewer's eyes scan the warped words on each cassette, the titles drive the point home:Judas Priest, Screaming for Vengeance. Motley Crue, Shout at the Devil. Boston, Don't Look Back.

You may still have the tunes on your Zune or Ipod, but you probably never dreamed to do something so amazing with the original cassettes still stored under the bed in the room your parents preserve like a shrine in the home of your youth. The skeleton was on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science, in Chicago, when Andrew Huff photographed it.

To see Dettmer's work with books and encyclopedia, it is worth a click to link Brian Dettmer's Flickr page and browse through the fantastic world of Dettmer's mind. Also, some great pics of Dettmer's Book Autopsies have sufficient detail to see how the layered words exposed in Dettmer's artworks add meaning to the images which he mines from the books. Dettmer never alters the pages, or page order, from that of the original book, which makes the "discovery" of the new meaning within that much more breathtaking.